Meet Republicans Halfway

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Here’s a bipartisan deal for the Senate to consider: Republicans publicly commit to ending their efforts at Obamacare repeal, and Democrats start to confirm more of President Trump’s nominees.

So far, the Senate has obstructed those nominees at a higher rate than for any president on record. Only 20 percent of President Trump’s executive-branch nominees had been confirmed through July 31, compared with at least 56 percent at the same point in the terms of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, according to the Partnership for Public Service. Dozens of top jobs across various cabinet departments remain unfilled as a result.

Until now, the Democrats have had a good reason for their obstruction. It was a response to the unprecedented process that Senate Republicans pursued on health care. They rushed votes, tried to discredit independent analyses and refused to hold hearings.

“If they continue to insist on ramming through a secret health care bill without any public input or debate,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said in June, “they shouldn’t expect business as usual in the Senate.”

I understand the instinct that some Democrats have to oppose the Trump administration in every conceivable way. And if Democrats want to hold up some specific nominations to protest Trump’s disdain for the rule of law, I’d be all for it.

Yet the current level of obstruction should not continue indefinitely.

It would be a mistake for Democrats to set a precedent that would rob future presidents of the ability to staff their own administration.

On the news. The Wall Street Journal refused to publish a transcript of its own interview with the president, apparently to avoid embarrassing both Trump and Gerard Baker, the Journal’s editor. But Politico’s Josh Dawsey and Hadas Gold got the transcript and published it. (I wrote about the battles between Baker and his staff in a February column.)

The Senate confirmed Christopher Wray as the new F.B.I. director yesterday. Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have argued that Wray deserves confirmation — but doesn’t deserve to serve out his 10-year term: “To give Wray his ten years would send a message to all future presidents that there is no cost for removing the FBI director and replacing him or her with your own person.”

Kenya, which is holding a presidential campaign, has its own “fake news” problem, Nanjala Nyabola writes in Foreign Policy: A timid media self-censors political news, opening the door to alternative information sources that aren’t always truthful.

Reader response. Several of you wrote or tweeted with the names of other people and organizations that helped save health insurance — in addition to those I mentioned in yesterday’s column.